Learn More About The Incredible Growth of Amazon RDS

Earlier this year, CNBC reported that Amazon Web Services (AWS) held 33 percent of the cloud infrastructure market in the quarter. While AWS has enjoyed a commanding lead in the cloud over the last few years, there wasn’t much data about the types of developers that use products such as its Relational Database Service (RDS). As recently as 2015, TechRepublic wrote that it was nearly impossible to find useful data on the popularity of RDS.

In partnership with Amazon Web Services, Stack Overflow utilized the results of its 2018 Developer Survey to better understand developers that use Amazon RDS. Each year, Stack Overflow surveys the programming community on a wide variety of topics related to their working environments and preferred technologies. This year, over 100,000 respondents from around the world participated in the yearly survey—and over 66,000 said that they use some form of a database for work.

Discover which developers types are most likely to use RDS, where they’re located, and the technologies that they use in our latest whitepaper.

DevOps specialists are most likely to use Amazon RDS

For this report, we looked at two categories of database users. First, we looked at users of managed databases, which we’ve defined as databases being maintained by a third party. Then, we analyzed developer types that install and manage databases by themselves, without the help of a third party vendor. Based on our findings, DevOps specialists are two times more likely to use Amazon RDS than any other developer type. DevOps professionals tend to use technologies that correlate directly with Amazon RDS, including Bash/Shell, Ruby, and Go.

Traffic to Amazon RDS-related content on Stack Overflow is growing by 40%

Stack Overflow serves millions of developers each month, which enabled us to examine trends around the year-over-year growth of databases among our users. For this report, we looked at traffic increases to database-related content on Stack Overflow to understand each technology’s “growth.” Traffic to Amazon RDS-related content on Stack Overflow is growing at about 40% year over year from 2017 to 2018. This increase in traffic outpaces popular database technologies such as MariaDB and PostgreSQL.

Tenured developers are more likely to use Amazon RDS

This year, our survey results showed us that developers with five years or less of professional experience often use databases that they maintain themselves, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. On the other hand, nearly 30% of respondents with 20 years of experience said that they are using a managed database such as Amazon RDS. When they don’t opt for a managed database, the most popular option for these tenured programmers is SQL Server.

Rich is a Content Marketing Writer at Stack Overflow, where he covers the latest in tech recruiting and developer engagement. When he's not writing, Rich can be found hanging with his wife, watching his favorite college football team with his dad, or running around Manhattan in preparation for his next marathon.